Founded in 2002, the Israel Project (TIP) is a Washington- and Jerusalem-based lobbying organization that aims to provide journalists and the public with information about Israel and the Middle East with the goal of giving a "more positive public face" to the country.[1] Claiming to be a non-profit educational organization that “gets facts about Israel and the Middle East to press, public officials and the public,”[2] the group advocates a number of positions similar to neoconservative groups and other U.S. organizations aligned with Israel’s conservative Likud Party.
During the Summer 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, TIP hired Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research to undertake an opinion poll aimed at measuring U.S. public support for Israel as that country bombed southern Lebanon. According to Christian Science Monitor, the TIP poll found that support for Israel had risen to 60% by July 2006, up from 45% that January. Asked about the poll, TIP's Jennifer Laszlo Mizrah said:
"Americans are so close to Israel that when Israel's at war, they really rally around Israel." She added, however: "You can't expect that that level of excitement will sustain throughout a military engagement."[11]More recently, in 2010, a TIP-sponsored poll found that “pro-Israel” attitudes were purportedly sharply declining in the United States. Haaretz reported, “One of the questions that the poll presented was ’Does the U.S. need to support Israel?’ In August of 2009, 63% of Americans polled said that the U.S. does need to support Israel. In June of this year, 58% of respondents shared the same view; by July only 51% of respondents said the U.S. needed to support Israel.
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